Bitch Media - female directorshttp://bitchmagazine.org/taxonomy/term/9468/0
en"You Need to Fall in Love With Story": An Interview with "Carrie" Director Kimberly Peircehttp://bitchmagazine.org/post/you-need-to-fall-in-love-with-story-an-interview-with-carrie-director-kimberly-peirce
<p><img src="http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3760/10678903365_3230031d02_o.jpg" alt="director kim pierce" width="214" height="317" /><img src="http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2893/10678906775_0f3d788800_n.jpg" alt="The poster for Carrie, featuring a blood-soaked dress" width="214" height="317" /></p>
<p><em>Director Kim Peirce and the blood-soaked poster for her new film, the </em>Carrie <em>remake.&nbsp;</em></p>
<p>Filmmaker Kimberly Peirce is a crusader. Like the protagonist of her latest film, <em><a href="http://bit.ly/1cXH3DS" target="_blank">Carrie</a></em>, Hollywood has failed to bully her around. She’s kept at the business and art she loves, despite being passed her over for major projects and has carved out her own success, taking the helm of unconventional films like <em>Boys Don’t Cry</em> and <em>Stop Loss</em>. During her long career, she’s also been an outspoken voice against censorship—as best seen in <em>This Film is not yet Rated</em>—and, in her free time, directed an episode of The <em>L Word.</em></p>
<p>Peirce spoke with <em>Bitch </em>about her history with Carrie White, the appeal of revenge stories, mother-daughter relationships, and filmmaking while female.&nbsp;<em>&nbsp;</em></p>
<p><strong>MONICA CASTILLO: What drew you to remaking Carrie's story?</strong></p>
<p>KIMBERLY PEIRCE: I had read the Steven King book as a kid. I was a literature student at University of Chicago, and I think I reread it around then. I love Steven King, but I'm blown away by just how great and entertaining the writing is. I fell madly in love again with the character of Carrie White. I love that she's a misfit and an outcast who wants love and acceptance, which is what we all want, but has to face these extraordinary obstacles to gain that satisfaction.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Particularly, when the girls at school give her a hard time. She has a wonderful relationship with her mother that's complicated and fraught with conflict. Her mother loves her, but will repress her from sinning and going out into the world. I fell in love with the relationship between them, but also where Carrie goes with her powers. As a disenfranchised person, I loved that when she discovers her powers, it became her way of being okay in the world, like the way any of us has a talent or seeks that thing that makes life bearable. The powers made her life bearable; they make her feel like everybody else—she felt so disempowered.</p>
<p><strong>It’s a very multifaceted story.</strong></p>
<p>I loved the complication of the boy asking her out to prom. We know that Sue shouldn’t have offered her boyfriend to Carrie. We know that’s a disaster in the making. We know Carrie shouldn’t say yes, but Carrie so desperately wants the Cinderella evening. She wants what we all want.</p>
<p>As a writer/director, I knew, “Wow, this is a great story.”</p>
<p><strong>Did you feel the need to revisit Carrie’s story since it seems we’re talking so much more about bullying than before?</strong></p>
<p>I think what’s so amazing about the novel: It’s so fantastic in its era but, in the way classic literature works, it’s even more timely and relevant now in terms of human relations, in terms of human empowerment, in terms of revenge, and particularly in terms of how people relate to one another. I’m amazed in just the last five years, we all have a cell phone camera that takes pictures, records things, and makes videos. We are no longer content to just experience things, we have to record it and put it onto Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter.</p>
<p>If you look back at human history, I believe we’ve always needed to communicate, and this is just one new facet of that. But in that communication, what good or harm has it done? In my adaptation, we’re deeply involved in the modern world. When the girls reject Carrie, a video gets made, uploaded, and disseminated out there that causes more harm to Carrie. That stuff was so rich, so necessary to me.</p>
<p><strong>I want to jump back to the mother-daughter relationship in <em>Carrie</em>. I found an old quote from you claiming, “I think girls need to break up with their mothers.” I’m guessing this applies to Carrie’s case?</strong></p>
<p>What I probably should have said is that people need to break up with their parents. The process of individualization requires that we’re deeply meshed with our parents, but at some point break free. If I’m going to point a light on mothers and daughters, my own and also all my friends’, it seems like mothers and daughters have such an amazingly tight pact with one another. Probably because the mother is the maternal one and she’s usually the first and primary caregiver, and their bodies are similar.&nbsp; I think women are disempowered in our society and that causes bonding. It’s so rich and fascinating.</p>
<p><strong>And with <em>Carrie</em>?</strong></p>
<p>It’s the heart and soul in my movie. I really focused on it. I wrote and added a new scene at the beginning about their relationship. Grounding the movie in this mother-daughter relationship is how my movie works. It’s somebody in a quest for a need, up against obstacles, and that becomes the fuel in the engine that drives it all the way to the climax, which I also rewrote and readapted so it was a much stronger fight between them. So the mother’s trying to kill herself and Carrie is trying to save her life. It’s much more intense, and I think that’s what people want, that satisfaction.</p>
<p><strong>And then there’s Carrie’s revenge.</strong></p>
<p>The key to making this movie work is make the audience fall deeply in love with Carrie White. Even though she’s an outcast, even if she’s the disempowered, they have to love her. Even if they [the audience] feel like they’re not misfits in real life, we had to make it that you fall in love with Chloe Grace Moretz (the young actress who plays Carrie) so that you’re inside the scenes when people are giving her a hard time. She is annoying, she is out of it, but you’re engaged in that dream of wanting that Cinderella night, wearing a beautiful dress, going out to a ball, be with a boy, wanting to have it all.&nbsp;</p>
<p>But you also have to pay attention when it all starts to go wrong. You have to root for Chris, the bad girl, to make it all come crashing down so that you could root for Carrie to get her revenge. That’s the revenge of the underdog, and that’s so important because the revenge story can only work if you love Carrie and relate to her.</p>
<p><strong>What’s it like to recreate this very female-centric story in a year, which until recently, didn’t have many films starring women?</strong></p>
<p>I think it’s great that <em>Carrie</em> is so female-centric. For me, I love that we have a female protagonist, we have a mother-daughter relationship that’s the main love affair,&nbsp;we even have Carrie relating with Chris and Sue, who feels guilty and offers [Carrie] her boyfriend. She does what privileged people do, which is give charity. I love that Chris feels that every time Carrie gets support from Sue, her father, the principal, she escalates her attacks. How the two girls are using their boyfriends to do what they need done: Sue asks hers to take Carrie to the prom and Chris, while giving her boyfriend a blowjob, asks, “Will you help me in this thing against Carrie?” I love that there’s two heterosexual sex scenes that get interrupted so the girls can talk about Carrie. I don’t think we’ve ever quite had that.</p>
<p><strong>Would you call <em>Carrie </em>a feminist film?</strong></p>
<p>It is a feminist movie in so far that it’s about the underdog, and that’s essentially what feminism looks at.</p>
<p><strong>Do you like siding with the underdog in a story?</strong></p>
<p>I want to tell great stories. I want to tell stories about engaging characters. A story about characters that we can relate to, and it happens that a lot of those characters are underdogs. They get to go through the process of gaining powers over the course of the movie. Those characters on some level have some sort of flaw. It’s not like I’m restricted to some sort of underdog characters.</p>
<p><strong>Well, they are the favorite to survive a horror movie…</strong></p>
<p>What’s great about a great character and story is not only do you get a good opening weekend from people who love horror, but general audiences love a good story and that’s why they go back to these stories over and over again. There’s this great film called <em>Shock Value</em> that talks about Polanski, De Palma, and Hooper, and all those guys in the 70s really coming into the horror genre when people weren’t paying attention to it. They dug in there and they made these classic movies that have endured. I think that’s happening again. Audiences want horror, and they’ll go to horror that’s not that good. If you give them something good, they’ll come back, and they’ll talk about it.</p>
<p>That’s what we did with <em>Carrie</em>. We have a horror film you’re going to go to and we’re going to try and make this as good as we can to satisfy you. Hopefully with a great relationship and great acting, with an amazing revenge story, and with a girl with superpowers. I think people will have a good time seeing it. If we do it right.</p>
<p><strong>Last question: what advice would you give younger female filmmakers?&nbsp;</strong></p>
<p>If you really love this art form and you really want to do this because it’s hard work. You need to fall in love with characters. You need to fall in love with story.</p>
<p>Go ahead and take that class, learn whatever you can. I was very fortunate; I went to grad school and the Sundance Institute. I took classes for three or four years with great teachers. You can never know too much about this art form. It’s an art, it’s a business, and it’s amazingly challenging. You have to know a lot about life to do it. You’ll work with a lot of smart and sophisticated people who are brilliant and wonderful.</p>
<p>I would say this to anyone today, in particular to women: learn everything you can. Pick up a camera, write, assist, tell a story, shoot a story, edit it, and show that story. Get feedback and never be afraid of criticism. Be as collaborative as you can with everyone around you. We’re all born storytellers, the human experience is telling stories. People do all kinds of stuff, and they have audiences everywhere. Let yourself get better and better. You can be great; you can have a career. It’s hard but there are awesome filmmakers out there, whether it’s Kathryn Bigelow, Catherine Hardwick, or Jane Champion. They’re all fantastic filmmakers. Know you really want to do this. This is how it is with any climate of difference and they don’t have a history of making it into that business. We’re going to change that.</p>
<p><em>Watch the trailer for </em>Carrie <em>and read our <a href="http://bit.ly/1cXH3DS" target="_blank">review of the film</a></em><em>.</em></p>
<p><iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/H369sxjyhx8" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
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http://bitchmagazine.org/post/you-need-to-fall-in-love-with-story-an-interview-with-carrie-director-kimberly-peirce#commentsfemale directorshorrorMoviesMon, 04 Nov 2013 23:24:30 +0000Monica Castillo24537 at http://bitchmagazine.orgGet to Know the Feminist Filmmaker Who Vandalizes Commercialshttp://bitchmagazine.org/post/get-to-know-the-filmmaker-who-vandalizes-hair-dye-commercials-dinorah-de-jesus-rodriguez
<p><img src="http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5550/9458770615_b00fff6805_o.jpg" alt="A still from Dinorah's film, with an orange and pink model whose eyes are whited out" width="320" height="214" /><img src="http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3677/9458770595_f2edaf7347_o.jpg" alt="a hand painting a film strip frame by frame" width="300" height="215" /></p>
<p>Some of today's strongest intellectual work countering commercial representations of women comes from a filmmaker unknown to most Americans: <a href="http://solislandmediaworks.com/">Dinorah de Jesus Rodriguez</a>.</p>
<p>Miami-based, Cuban-born and bilingual, Rodriguez works in multiple modes: avant-garde film, installation, video art, and public intervention. In her filmmaking, Rodriguez manipulates and re-animates both found materials and her own original 16mm footage through re-cutting, painting or scratching the film surface one tiny frame at a time. As a result, Rodriguez's new film, the pre-existing film, and her artisanal process are visible simultaneously, layered one on top of the other. Rodriguez literally covers the original content with her critique so the viewer has to see it through her perspective. In this way, she appropriates media like old shampoo commercials and remakes them into new works.</p>
<p>To craft her best-known film <a href="http://blip.tv/sol-island-media-works-/is-it-true-blondes-have-more-fun-1670014">Do Blondes Have More Fun? (2005)</a> Rodriguez scratched and painted on the actual surface of a 90-second-long 16mm film print of a vintage Clairol Hair Dye commercial from the 1960s. The ad's blonde, carefree female characters are instantly recognizable rom-com urban types; in this fantasy world, the city belongs to young white women with thick, straight and long yellow hair—fun is <em>for</em> blondes. Rodriguez's film thus creates a dilemma for the spectator in that it necessarily relies upon and recirculates the very same pop culture clichés it defaces. Part of the pleasure of the film is precisely the familiar spectacle of young white women having fun, finding romance and feeling pretty in the city. Who doesn't want to feel that way? You just need to color your hair and join us!</p>
<p><iframe width="420" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/Y6GptMFBGxs" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
<p>Using humor and her hands, Rodriguez disrupts Clairol's invitation both visually and aurally. She painstakingly embellished frames full of polka dots and blocks of yellow scratches, arranged at times like fireworks or stars, exaggerating the blonde's supposed fun. Rodriguez recolored the model's blonde hair yellow and orange so it would be extra-blonde, and she even scratched out her teeth, making them seem to sparkle but in a grotesque way. The filmmaker attacked the commercial's sound too by repurposing a film projector's low hum to unsettle the commercial's jingle, "When you're blonde you wake up happy. Feel the good times all around you, everywhere you go." This layered soundscape represents the mental clutter to which our consumer-oriented and media-saturated culture relentlessly subjects us all.</p>
<p>Rodriguez's reworking of the Clairol commercial's physical surface demonstrates that its content is utterly artificial, false, and as thin as a filmstrip. Just plastic.</p>
<p>The artist's direct filmmaking technique is extremely labor-intensive, requiring hundreds of insomniac hours to fashion nearly molecular-size scratches on tiny 16mm-wide film frames. Unsurprisingly, her hand-painted graffiti films tend to be quite short—usually around three minutes—yet a few works such as her abstract trance film <em>Miami Remix</em> (2011) stretch to 11 minutes long. Rodriguez's carefully wrought ideas flutter before the spectator in a matter of seconds, often undetected, and that is okay.</p>
<p>Rodriguez's work is a gateway to a radically different filmmaking practice that challenges how we expect film to be produced and consumed. On her website, Rodriguez writes, "I believe there is tremendous power in the unseen, and I exploit that through the hidden mechanisms in moving images by directing the power of image, light and sound. I also love creating a spontaneous artistic experience in public places, but where people will stumble upon the art in the course of their daily lives." Her abstract animations cultivate an independent and active viewer.</p>
<p>Whether in a screening room or on a city street audiences may absorb Rodriguez's highly kinetic films as if in a dream or simply glimpse them in passing. The gift of Rodriguez's films is the freedom to see both the past and present anew; her direct experimental films welcome the skeptical spectator.&nbsp;</p>
<p><em>Writer Terri Francis is visiting Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.&nbsp;This article was made possible through the <a href="http://www.theopedproject.org/" target="_blank">OpEd Project</a>.&nbsp;</em></p>
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http://bitchmagazine.org/post/get-to-know-the-filmmaker-who-vandalizes-hair-dye-commercials-dinorah-de-jesus-rodriguez#commentscommercialismfemale directorswomen in filmMoviesWed, 07 Aug 2013 20:19:20 +0000Terri Francis23769 at http://bitchmagazine.orgA Skeptical Look at the Newest Disney Princess Film, Frozenhttp://bitchmagazine.org/post/a-skeptical-look-at-frozen-new-disney-princess-feminist-review-movie
<p><img src="http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2872/9130848886_67d85f2267.jpg" alt="The promotional art for Frozen, which features two white women dressed in medieval clothes" width="500" height="307" /></p>
<p>Disney released <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&amp;v=S1x76DoACB8">the trailer last week for <em>Frozen</em></a>, the newest installment in its <a href="http://princess.disney.com/">princess franchise</a>&nbsp;that's&nbsp;based off the tale of <a href="http://www.online-literature.com/hans_christian_andersen/972/">"The Snow Queen" by Hans Christian Andersen</a>.</p>
<p>The trailer itself is princess-less, instead following the antics of a snowman named Olaf and a reindeer named Sven as they vie for a carrot. It's hard to tell what the story will actually be about—as of yet, not much is known about the film's plot. But what we do know is enough to have <a href="http://nitrateglow.tumblr.com/post/37927161212/trungles-on-the-topic-of-frozen">put some feminists on alert</a>.</p>
<p>The problems with Disney princesses have obviously been reviewed before&nbsp;<a href="/post/some-problems-with-princesses">here at <em>Bitch</em></a> and <a href="http://theweek.com/article/index/244284/girls-on-film-the-real-problem-with-the-disney-princess-brand">elsewhere</a>. With&nbsp;<em>Frozen, </em>it looks like Disney is continuing with its same-old, same-old dynamics.</p>
<p>The Hans Christian Andersen story "The Snow Queen" is a great tale. It follows little girl named Gerda who goes on an icy journey all alone to find her kidnapped friend Kai, who is a boy. It's the opposite of a damsel in distress story.</p>
<p>The Disney version has rewritten the classic fairytale in a way that gives the heroine less credit. In the <a href="http://disney.wikia.com/wiki/Frozen" target="_blank">Disney version</a>, the main character Anna goes on a journey to find her sister Elsa, who has covered the kingdom in eternal winter. But not only is she not rescuing a boy, she's accompanied on the journey by a mountain man named Kristoff.</p>
<p>It's disappointing to see a story that was originally about a deeply independent and brave young woman on a rescue mission turned into a romance, as it inevitably will be. No one at Disney has inferred that a romantic relationship between Anna and Kristoff will be part of the movie, but <a href="/post/mom-pop-culture-princess-week">romantic love is central to almost every Disney princess's story</a>—and besides, why else add the character of Kristoff in the first place? Even if they don't fall in love, and he merely acts as Anna's guide, the fact that she needs one at all reproduces stereotypes about female weakness and the need for a strong male helper that the original narrative of "The Snow Queen" bucks.</p>
<p>Also disconcerting is the character of Elsa. It's nice to see a princess with a sister in a franchise where <a href="http://lipsredasroses.tumblr.com/post/51417367402/bechdel-test-the-disney-princess-movies">most heroines have few to no strong relationships with other women</a>. But it's not so nice to see that sister being positioned as the potential villain. This is especially the case on the heels of <em>Brave</em>, which, <a href="/post/the-five-least-and-most-princess-y-things-about-brave-merida-feminist-magazine-disney-pixar">for all wasn't perfect</a>&nbsp;in the film, centered on a healthy, empowering, and positive female-female (mother-daughter) relationship. Is it really too much to ask for that to happen twice in a row?</p>
<p>There may be some hope on the horizon. <em>Frozen</em> will, at the very least, be the first feature film to come out of Disney Animation Studios that features a female director (<a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1601644/?ref_=sr_2">Jennifer Lee</a>, although she shares the credit with <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0118333/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1">Chris Buck</a>). Plus, most of the above is speculation – maybe Anna and Kristoff won't fall in love, and maybe Anna and Elsa will have a positive relationship, and maybe Elsa won't turn out to be the villain, or if she is, maybe she'll survive at the very least. As a kid who grew up with Disney, and an admitted (if ashamed) fan of Disney Princesses, I'd really like to see that. But from where I'm standing, it doesn't look terribly likely.</p>
<p><em>Related Reading: We reviewed the <a href="http://bit.ly/1gCtJ9v" target="_blank">pros and cons of Frozen</a> when it came out in theaters.</em></p>
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http://bitchmagazine.org/post/a-skeptical-look-at-frozen-new-disney-princess-feminist-review-movie#commentsDisneyfemale directorsFrozenprincessesMoviesMon, 24 Jun 2013 23:17:04 +0000Hanna White23134 at http://bitchmagazine.orgNew Film "Black Rock" and the Horror of Rape Culturehttp://bitchmagazine.org/post/new-film-black-rock-and-the-horror-of-rape-culture
<p><img style="float: right; margin: 10px;" src="http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3673/8808780605_23cec3d67b.jpg" alt="black rock movie poster" width="250" height="400" /></p>
<p>The premise is deceptively simple: A group of girlfriends reunite on a Maine camping trip for the first time in years. They come across three military men, long-ago acquaintances from school, and the groups merge for a lakeshore party. Alcohol is imbibed, and one of the girls heads off to the woods with one of the men.</p>
<p>And that's where new film <em>Black Rock</em> turns into <em>The Most Dangerous Game</em>: <em>Men vs. Women edition</em>. The leading ladies—played by Katie Aselton, Lake Bell, and Kate Bosworth—are sympathetic from the start because of their begrudging effort to get past old differences. Being that this is a brisk 79-minute film, not much time is devoted to the girls' backgrounds past their friendship. But the film is insists that they're not "cannon fodder" for the bad guys, an empathetic difference between <em>Black Rock</em> and similar flicks that kill off the characters with no remorse.&nbsp;</p>
<p><em>Black Rock</em>'s story is a loose allegory of rape culture. Instead of the party going smoothly, one of the men attempts to rape Lake Bell's character, she fights back, and in her struggle, kills the attacker. His enraged cohorts decide to murder all the girls for revenge. After the attack and death, the men only see the fact that she murdered him while the woman's friends decry the attempted assault. You can hear the words "self-defense" and "rape" fall on deaf ears as the men yell that the woman "lured" their friend into the woods for sex. The only way to right the situation in the soldiers' minds (other than run for the town doctor) is to kill the survivor and her supporters.</p>
<p>Although filmmaker Mark Duplass shares co-writing credit and producing credit with his wife, director Katie Aselton, the film is set firmly from the viewpoint of the women and lacks many of Duplass' trademarks—his messy handheld style can't muck up a movie shot in the dark as Aselton shows much more conventional control of her camera. She desaturates the movie's colors, giving the film a sense of foreboding long before we set foot off the grey mainland.</p>
<p>So what is the horror in this horror film? <em>Black Rock</em> is much more complex than your average run-of-the-mill "run from danger, pretty lady" kind of movie. Instead, it's a bro-code that terrorizes women and instead of scene after scene of blood and guts, <em>Black Rock's</em> horror is muted, taking place mostly in the tense fight sequences with men twice their size. Director Aselton credit is onto something. She knows how to foster and capture the camaraderie of her lead characters, and she also knows how to shoot her story. Goodness knows we need less triggering entries into the horror genre.&nbsp;</p>
http://bitchmagazine.org/post/new-film-black-rock-and-the-horror-of-rape-culture#commentsfemale directorshorrorrapewomen in filmMoviesSat, 25 May 2013 00:03:15 +0000Monica Castillo22761 at http://bitchmagazine.orgFire, Wolves, Vaginas: Filmmaker Vanessa Renwick Releases 30 Years of Work http://bitchmagazine.org/post/fires-wolves-vaginas-filmmaker-vanessa-renwick-releases-20-years-of-work
<p><img src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8533/8680144789_788be09233.jpg" alt="Vanessa Renwick" width="500" height="338" /></p>
<p>Things are shaky and spooky in <a href="http://www.odoka.org/about/" target="_blank">Vanessa Renwick</a>'s short films. Watching her films, I'm never really sure where I am or why I'm there or what will happen, but I'm compelled to go along for the ride. It feels like rubbernecking, craning my neck to peer into her lightly alternate universe for a while. Renwick, now 51, shot many of her tiny films on hand-held film cameras in late eighties and early nineties, drawing on her own wildly varied life experiences for subject matter.</p>
<p>In <em>Olympia</em>, Renwick films the messy homebirth of a friend, surrounded by midwives and a little out of focus; in <em><a href="http://www.odoka.org/the_work/the_yodeling_lesson/114/" target="_blank">The Yodeling Lesson</a></em>, a woman bikes up a steep hill then rides down naked, completely calm and fearless; in <em><a href="http://www.odoka.org/the_work/toxic_shock/" target="_blank">Toxic Shock</a></em>, Renwick's experience nearly dying from toxic shock syndrome leads to a punchy music-video-of-a-film where tampons are used to create Molotov cocktails. &nbsp;For two years in her youth, Renwick hitchhiked the country with her dog and refused to wear shoes. These days, her life is more subdued—with a grown daughter and son and plenty of footwear—and so is her work. Her newest film <em>Portland Meadows</em> is a portrait of the surreal world of Portland's horseracing track.</p>
<p>This week, Renwick releases a <a href="http://www.odoka.org/general_store/" target="_blank">DVD collection of her films called&nbsp;<em>NSEW</em></a> and is hosting a&nbsp;<a href="http://hollywoodtheatre.org/vanessa-renwick-retrospective/" target="_blank">retrospective at the Hollywood Theater in Portland</a> this Thursday and Friday night, April 25th and 26th.</p>
<p>We talked last week in her Northeast Portland home.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 300px;">• • •</p>
<p><em>SARAH MIRK: You've made a lot of films about extreme things, like birth and abortion and not wearing shoes for two years. How do you feel watching them now? Do they feel young and strange? Do they feel extreme?</em></p>
<p>VANESSA RENWICK: They don't feel extreme to me, they just feel normal because that's my life, it's what makes me who I am. I think I'm much calmer now and my films are much more steady. I'm not so spastic. My mind still gets blown, but if want to relate something to you in a story, you're not going to see my mind being blown in the story. Like in <em>Olympia</em>, after you see the baby come out, the camera is all over the place because I'm like, "Oh my God! I can't focus! This is so intense!" I don't think that would happen now.&nbsp; I feel much steadier. Although I still feel like I make ridiculous, stupid things—not like stupid, but you know, silly—but then I also make things that are way more slow and contemplative.&nbsp;</p>
<p><em>One thing I like about being a reporter is I like to have a role. It changes how I experience events to be recording them and thinking how they'll become a story. How does it change your perception of experiences to have a camera in your hand?</em></p>
<p>I like to think about things for a while. My friend Michael Brophy, he's a painter, he paints every single day. People would look at the way I live my life and think I'm not working every single day because I'm not shooting with my camera or editing every day. But I feel like I'm working almost 24 hours a day with everything that's coming at me or that I'm reading, I'm doing all this research and contemplating and thinking about how things should go in work that I make. Then when I am shooting, it's easier. I like that filmmaking puts you in so many different situations that I wouldn't normally be in. Like when I was making <em>Portland Meadows</em>, I brought [her daughter] Montana with me, it was her birthday. I was saying to her, "Isn't filmmaking cool? You get to be in all these different places. You get to be up in the announcer's booth at a racetrack, you get to be in the women's jockey's changing room, this is amazing!"</p>
<p><em>What are you thinking while you watch your old films?</em></p>
<p>It's been almost 10 years since I went on a tour where I showed all of them, where I'd see them every night. Thinking about how it goes together one after another, it was like, whoa, I've made a lot of work. I know I'm a filmmaker, but sometimes I also forget I'm a filmmaker, because I'm on the edge, you know, I'm not making a gigantic living off this work.</p>
<p><em>Do you feel like you're critical when you watch your own films?</em></p>
<p>I'm not that self-critical. Even when I was watching <em>Portland Meadows</em> just now, you can see one of the guys I interviewed, you can see the cord for his microphone. It's so fucking sloppy of me not to put the cord under his shirt. But then I look around and there's all these other cords in the shot—it's kind of like Portland mentality Before I moved here, I used to wear a pillbox hat and taffeta skirts and dress up all the time and then I turned into a Portland slob! Portland's kind of lazy in a way and my filmmaking is like that in a way, sometimes. I don't know that it's&nbsp; lazy or sloppy, but it's loose.&nbsp; And I'm okay with that.</p>
<p><em>You used to wear a pillbox hat? I thought you didn't wear shoes.</em></p>
<p>That's right, I was always either barefoot or wore cowboy boots.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>Photo credit: Donovan Skirvin.</strong></p>
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http://bitchmagazine.org/post/fires-wolves-vaginas-filmmaker-vanessa-renwick-releases-20-years-of-work#commentsfemale directorswomen in filmMoviesThu, 25 Apr 2013 15:43:26 +0000Sarah Mirk22354 at http://bitchmagazine.orgWhy Don't Female Directors Get Nominated for Oscars? It's About Money, Money, Money.http://bitchmagazine.org/post/why-dont-female-directors-get-nominated-for-oscars-money-money-money
<p class="p1" style="padding-left: 180px;"><img src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8053/8444770191_04bbc27d5b_o.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="300" /></p>
<p class="p1">In the 85-year-long history of the Academy Awards, only four women have been nominated for Best Director. That's absurd.&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p1">This year, the <a href="http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/movies/academy/la-et-unmasking-oscar-academy-project-html,0,7473284.htmlstory" target="_blank">77 percent male, 94 percent white Academy</a> made it clear that they weren't ready to recognize a woman twice for outstanding directorial work when they <a href="http://hellogiggles.com/why-was-kathryn-bigelow-snubbed">snubbed Kathryn Bigelow</a> for her work on <em>Zero Dark Thirty</em>. Bigelow became the first woman to win a Best Director Oscar in 2009 for <em>The Hurt Locker. </em>Her new film, based on true events leading up to the killing of Osama Bin Laden, snagged nods for Best Picture, Best Actress, and Best Screenwriter, but Oscar left no love for Bigelow herself.&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p1">Let's get this straight: While Hollywood is still male-dominated, lots of women made excellent films this year. In stark contrast to the Oscars, women filmmakers had huge success at last month's <a href="http://www.sundance.org/festival/stories/award-winners/" target="_blank">Sundance Film Festival</a>. The lopsidedness of this year's Oscar nominees underscores the challenges faced by women working in the world of blockbuster films.&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p1">The problem here is not the quality of films made by women. The problem is Oscar economics.&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p1">Bigelow is one of very few women directing films with the kind of budget and wide-scale distribution that tend to attract the Academy. The majority of female filmmakers work in the independent community, where Sundance is the Holy Grail of festivals. This year, women directed more films in Sundance's US Dramatic category than ever before, and several women took home top prizes across multiple categories. Jill Soloway won the U.S. Dramatic Directing Award for <em>Afternoon Delight</em>, Lake Bell won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting award for <em>In a World...</em>, Michèle Stephenson won the US Documentary Special Jury Award with co-director Joe Brewster for <em>American Promise</em>, Jehane Noujaim won the World Cinema Documentary Audience Award for <em>The Square </em>(<em>Al Midan</em>), and Kalyanee Mam won the World Cinema Grand Jury Documentary Prize for <em>A River Changes Course.&nbsp;</em></p>
<p class="p1">However, a recent <a href="http://www.wif.org/press/press-releases/882-sundance-institute-and-women-in-film-los-angeles-study-examines-gender-disparity-in-independent-film">USC study</a> commissioned by the Sundance Institute and Women in Film Los Angeles found that from 2002 to 2012, there was no significant change in numbers of women behind the camera of films selected for the Sundance Film Festival, indicating that this year's successes may not reflect overall progress for women filmmakers.</p>
<p class="p1">Still, the study found that <a href="http://www.wif.org/press/press-releases/882-sundance-institute-and-women-in-film-los-angeles-study-examines-gender-disparity-in-independent-film" target="_blank">women directed 25 percent of narrative films at Sundance</a>, a far better showing than women have in Hollywood, where women directed only 4.4 percent of the top 100 grossing films from the same ten year period. Women seeking to make the jump from the indie world to the commercial industry clearly face what the authors of the study call "a very steep fiscal cliff" marked by male-dominated funding structures and networks. Notably, Bigelow's <em>The Hurt Locker </em>had the <a href="http://www.pajiba.com/box_office_round-ups/ranking-the-box-office-results-of-the-last-30-best-picture-winners-adjusted-for-inflation.php" target="_blank">lowest box office take of any Best Picture winner in 30 years</a>.&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p1">The size of production budgets frequently go hand-in-hand with the number of theaters to which distribution companies send a film.&nbsp; Since women tend to direct small-budget, independent fare, most moviegoers never get the opportunity to see many of the films made by women—even the ones that make a splash at Sundance.&nbsp;</p>
<p class="p1">If Hollywood wants to prove that it's no longer a boy's club, the Academy needs a demographic shake-up in order to start regularly recognizing excellent work by women like Bigelow, and studios need to give women more access to production funds. The best movies should be the ones winning awards, regardless of how much they cost to create.</p>
http://bitchmagazine.org/post/why-dont-female-directors-get-nominated-for-oscars-money-money-money#commentseconomicsfemale directorsKathryn BigelowOscarsMoviesMon, 04 Feb 2013 21:06:33 +0000Courtney Sheehan21207 at http://bitchmagazine.orgHorror Show: Silver Screen Scream Queenshttp://bitchmagazine.org/post/horror-show-silver-screen-scream-queens
<p>For some reason, there is an outdated notion that women don't like horror movies. The truth is, women don't just like horror—they've been making it for decades, and the genre would not be itself today it if it weren't for the perseverance of women in the industry.</p>
<p><img src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1323/5105526202_bc43583287.jpg" width="188" height="250" alt="A close-up of Paula Maxa looking melodramatic next to a man in spectacles" align="left" hspace="10" />The first notable Scream Queen, <b>Paula Maxa</b>, an actress of the early 20th century. Coined as "the most assassinated woman in the world," Maxa was strangled, raped, decapitated, stabbed, disemboweled, scalped, whipped, hanged, and burned thousands of times on stage with the infamous Le Theatre du Grand-Guignol (sort of like an old-timey slasher flick). Not much is known about Maxa's life, but it is revealed that she was eventually shoved out of the Grand Guignol in 1933 for supposedly stealing the show. However, her passionate 16-year run in the theatre opened the door for women to pursue cinematic careers.<br clear="all" /></p>
<p><img src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1134/5105526406_b314152689.jpg" width="250" height="327" alt="A collage piece of Alice Guy Blache. Her black and white photo is superimposed on a green paisley pattern" align="right" hspace="10" />Entering cinema in 1896, <b>Alice Guy-Blaché</b> is considered to be one of the very first directors of a fiction film, <i>La Fée aux Choux</i> (The Cabbage Fairy), a French horror film. Guy-Blaché worked as a secretary for the fledgling Gaumant Film Company in 1894 where she was only allowed to direct films on her days off, with no pay. She and her husband moved to the United States around 1907 and opened the The Solax Company, the largest pre-Hollywood studio in America, directing over 300 films in her lifetime. In 1912, Guy-Blaché spoke out in an interview with Harvey Gates about sexism on the film set: "Women are commonly in a state of dependence….art is practically the only field open to them…so long as a woman remains in what they term 'her place' she suffers little vexation." In 1918, Guy-Blaché 's husband left her for a younger actress. Guy-Blaché sued for divorce and took back her maiden name, returning to France with her children. Unable to find work, she claimed that "sexism made it impossible for her to pursue directing in France." She returned to the United States in 1927 to find no copies of her 300 films available to help her find employment, not even with the Library of Congress. <br clear="all" /></p>
<p>Following in Guy-Blaché 's footsteps, many other women jumped into the foray of filmmaking until the mid-1920s when the Hollywood Studio System was bought out by the big banks. Suddenly, leadership positions in film were deemed too sophisticated for women; work was lost, destroyed, and/or belittled. Proving that women, indeed, have the creativity, talent, and drive to make excellent films that sell, <b>Ida Lupino</b> stepped onto the set as a noir actress and then into the director's chair. </p>
<p><img src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1434/5105526934_c96d4e2a0a.jpg" width="320" height="400" alt="A black and white photo of Lupino. She stands with her arms crossed, looking determined and holding a cigarette next to a large camera that takes up as much of the photo as she does." align="left" hspace="10" />Lupino started her directing, producing and writing career in the 1940s, while on suspension for turning down an acting role at Warner Brothers. Instead of vacationing as most actors did at the time, Lupino hung around film sets and learned from directors and crew. With her husband at the time, she formed her production company, The Filmakers. Lupino yearned to make socially conscious films. Most notably, she directed <i>Outrage</i>, a film about rape, and <i>Hitchhiker</i>, based on the true story about the serial killer, Billy Cook. Lupino stayed on top of her game by naming her Director's chair "Mother," in reference to her male-dominated sets and once stated in an interview "I try never to blow—they're just waiting for you to do it." Lupino was a multi-talented artist who treated both men and women with respect. When The Filmakers dissolved and quality roles were scarce, Lupino turned to television to direct episodes of <i>The Twilight Zone</i>, <i>Alfred Hitchcock Presents</i>, and hundreds of others.</p>
<p>Like Lupino, other women have had to fight tooth and nail for their filmmaking careers, and have been forced to go outside of Hollywood to independent investors to receive financing, not so different from most current female filmmakers. But with the dawn of the Internet and digital technology, there has been a wave of contemporary female horror filmmakers creating ultra low budget flicks. (See <a href="/post/horror-show-women-horror-directors-to-watch">Hannah Neurotica's post</a> on female horror filmmakers to watch!)<br clear="all" /></p>
<p>This month, seek out the work of these filmmakers, tell others about them, and demand more to encourage these emerging filmmakers, because they need your support. An even better idea is to pick up a camera and make a horror movie. Yes, you! Do it for Alice, Ida, and Paula, but most importantly, do it for yourself.</p>
<p><i>Shannon Lark is an actress, filmmaker, and the co-director of the Viscera Film Festival, the first horror film festival dedicated to female directors. Learn more at <a href="http://www.viscerafilmfestival.com">viscerafilmfestival.com</a>.</i></p>
<p>Remember, Bitch readers: Since this is part of the Horror Show series, whoever leaves the best comment gets a shiny copy of The Exorcist on DVD! Be sure to register before you comment so you can claim your prize—if you dare!</p>
<p><img src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4103/5051654746_947d3b922a_m.jpg" /><img src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4133/5051034971_1b22c0af6a_t.jpg" /></p>
http://bitchmagazine.org/post/horror-show-silver-screen-scream-queens#commentsfemale directorshorrorHorror ShowMoviesFri, 22 Oct 2010 18:20:41 +0000Shannon Lark6711 at http://bitchmagazine.orgPush(back) at the Intersections: Who Writes These Representations, Anyway? http://bitchmagazine.org/post/pushback-at-the-intersections-who-writes-these-representations-anyway
<p>Back in May, Melissa Silverstein at Women and Hollywood posted a great breakdown of the fall television pickups, <a href="http://womenandhollywood.com/2010/05/24/fall-2010-tv-season-shows-created-by-women/">looking specifically at shows created by women</a>. Across the major networks (ABC, Fox, CBS, NBC, and the CW), 27 new shows were picked up. Of those 27, five had female creators. The picture during pilot season was equally grim; of the scripts created by women, very few went to pilot. </p>
<p>Hollywood has long been recognized as a difficult place for women. Actresses are constantly under scrutiny and will be criticized for speaking out; look at the collective punishment of Katherine Heigl when she dared to suggest that she was unhappy on <em>Grey's Anatomy</em>, for example. Or the salacious reporting on <a href="/post/transcontinental-disability-choir-the-public-comsumption-of-britney">women in Hollywood with mental illness</a>. Women who want to get on the other side of the camera face an equally uphill battle, because Hollywood is most definitely a (white) man's world, female representation in upper management at the networks aside. </p>
<p>I've been reading and thinking a lot about the lack of women in television and film these days, especially as I started thinking about some of my favorite work while I was getting ready for this round of Bitch blogging. My favorite TV shows, for example, are made by creators like Joss Whedon. David Eick. Ronald D. Moore. Alan Ball. Rob Thomas. Bryan Fuller. Matthew Weiner. Oh, and Shonda Rhimes. That list is a pretty accurate representation of the slant when it comes to representing women behind the camera and in the writer's room, honestly. </p>
<p>When I get into discussions about representations in pop culture, one of the things I'm naturally curious about is who is responsible for those representations. Generally speaking, people write to their own experiences best. There's a reason David Fisher on <em>Six Feet Under</em> feels so complex and real; it's because Alan Ball is gay, and he can write and depict that experience really honestly. It's not that women would return 100% perfect and unflawed representations of other women, but surely they deserve a fighting chance, and on something other than a male-female writing team where for some reason the man gets all the credit. </p>
<p>And when you get into the representation of minority women in Hollywood, the statistics are even more dire. Few nonwhite women manage to become creators (<a href="/post/pushback-at-the-intersections-women-making-pop-culture">Shonda Rhimes</a> and her impressive and hard-won career being a notable exception). Likewise, disabled women are not well represented. Trans women? *crickets* Does it come as any surprise, then, that so many representations are so deeply flawed and troubling? Shows think to hire consultants on, say, medical issues, but not to hire consultants to discuss human experiences. </p>
<p>Men writing women is a problem pretty much as old as dirt, but so are people in general positions of dominance writing the experiences of people in marginalized groups.</p>
<p>The commonality of really problematic depictions in Hollywood and other aspects of pop culture is, to my eye, a pretty compelling argument for improving representation on the creative teams behind the media we consume. However, it's clear that better representations aren't necessarily something that people are interested in. Indeed, Silverstein notes that in the world of television, <a href="http://womenandhollywood.com/2010/01/29/women-are-missing-as-tv-creators/">shows created by women about women are among the least likely to get picked up</a>, which suggests that the networks don't care about accurate depictions. </p>
<p>The networks, the publishers, the studios, the galleries—the argument goes—care about what sells. And it's worth pondering what is selling in the current pop culture market. We the consumers supposedly dictate the market by choosing what we do and don't engage with. </p>
<p>And it turns out that what a lot of people are choosing to consume is incredibly problematic and troubling. Which might explain why there's so much resistance to feminist critiques of pop culture; we're not just raising a ruckus, we're ruining the fun. We're challenging the status quo by demanding that people examine the media they consume. </p>
<p>Why do we have to go dragging our feminism in front of the television set like that? Down in front!</p>
http://bitchmagazine.org/post/pushback-at-the-intersections-who-writes-these-representations-anyway#commentsbarriersfemale directorsfemale writersproducersPush(back) at the Intersectionsscreenwriterswomen in HollywoodSocial CommentaryMon, 16 Aug 2010 16:49:40 +0000s.e. smith5014 at http://bitchmagazine.org